Study busts conventional wisdom on price and reliability.

You've probably heard the argument: wind and solar power are well and good, but what about when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine? But it's always windy and sunny somewhere. Given a sufficient distribution of energy resources and a large enough network of electrically conducting tubes, plus a bit of storage, these problems can be overcome—technologically, at least.

But is it cost-effective to do so? A new study from the University of Delaware finds that renewable energy sources can, with the help of storage, power a large regional grid for up to 99.9 percent of the time using current technology. By 2030, the cost of doing so will hit parity with current methods. Further, if you can live with renewables meeting your energy needs for only 90 percent of the time, the economics become positively compelling.

"These results break the conventional wisdom that renewable energy is too unreliable and expensive," said study co-author Willett Kempton, a professor at the University of Delaware's School of Marine Science and Policy. "The key is to get the right combination of electricity sources and storage—which we did by an exhaustive search—and to calculate costs correctly."

By exhaustive, Kempton is referring to the 28 billion combinations of inland and offshore wind and photovoltaic solar sources combined with centralized hydrogen, centralized batteries, and grid-integrated vehicles analyzed in the study. The researchers deliberately overlooked constant renewable sources of energy such as geothermal and hydro power on the grounds that they are less widely available geographically.

These technologies were applied to a real-world test case: that of the PJM Interconnection regional grid, which covers parts of states from New Jersey to Indiana, and south to North Carolina. The model used hourly consumption data from the years 1999 to 2002; during that time, the grid had a generational capacity of 72GW catering to an average demand of 31.5GW. Taking in 13 states, either whole or in part, the PJM Interconnection constitutes one fifth of the USA's grid. "Large" is no overstatement, even before considering more recent expansions that don't apply to the dataset used.

The researchers constructed a computer model using standard solar and wind analysis tools. They then fed in hourly weather data from the region for the whole four-year period—35,040 hours worth. The goal was to find the minimum cost at which the energy demand could be met entirely by renewables for a given proportion of the time, based on the following game plan:

When there's enough renewable energy direct from source to meet demand, use it. Store any surplus.

When there is not enough renewable energy direct from source, meet the shortfall with the stored energy.

When there is not enough renewable energy direct from source, and the stored energy reserves are insufficient to bridge the shortfall, top up the remaining few percent of the demand with fossil fuels.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the precise mix required depends upon exactly how much time you want renewables to meet the full load. Much more surprising is the amount of excess renewable infrastructure the model proposes as the most economic. To achieve a 90-percent target, the renewable infrastructure should be capable of generating 180 percent of the load. To meet demand 99.9 percent of the time, that rises to 290 percent.

"So much excess generation of renewables is a new idea, but it is not problematic or inefficient, any more than it is problematic to build a thermal power plant requiring fuel input at 250 percent of the electrical output, as we do today," the study argues.

Increasing diversity, reduced need for back-ups

The jump from 90 to 99.9 percent provision does require greater diversity in the renewable sources used, requiring "significant amounts" of inland wind, offshore wind, and photovoltaic solar power. However, that greater diversity actually reduces the need for both energy storage and fossil fuel back-ups compared with 90-percent provision because the chances of usable energy coming from somewhere are greater. To meet the demand only 30 percent of the time, inland wind alone is sufficient, the study finds.

Efficiencies improve further if, rather than being stored, surplus energy is used to offset gas to provide heating. This is viable, the argument goes, despite the inferior efficiency of electric heating because the costs of renewable energy is largely capital. Once built, the cost of "fuel" is effectively zero, unlike gas. It's cheaper to use it than store it, the researchers argue, even if you use it relatively inefficiently.

But this is all moot if renewables can't compete with fossil fuels. The key to finding out whether they can is the researcher's estimate that the total cost today of providing 1kWh of electricity via the PJM Interconnection is 17¢. The researchers used 2008 costs to calculate what it would take to supply all power from renewables for 30 percent of the day. By the researcher's calculations, the cost is already cheaper than the figure, coming in at 10 ¢/kWh.

However, for 90 percent, the cost jumps to to 19 ¢/kWh best case (which uses hydrogen storage), while the cost for 99.9 percent coverage rises to a best case (using vehicle storage) of 26 ¢/kWh. These rates include the cost of procuring and installing the energy infrastructure in the first place.

Wormhole your way to 2030, however, and it's a different story. A target of 90 percent coverage falls to to 9¢/kWh (vehicle storage) or 10 ¢/kWh (hydrogen storage), while a 99.9-percent target falls to 17 ¢/kWh for either vehicle or hydrogen storage. Central battery storage is more expensive, at 15 or 25 ¢/kWh for 90 or 99.9-percent coverage. And, according to the research, you can knock a few cents of all of these figures if you use energy surpluses to offset gas for heating. Then, the cost of meeting 90-percent coverage using vehicle storage comes in at 6 ¢/kWh at 2030 tech prices, for example. Costs are adjusted to 2010 dollar-value for ease.

"Aiming for 90 percent or more renewable energy in 2030, in order to achieve climate change targets of 80-90 percent reduction of CO2 from the power sector, leads to economic savings, not costs," the researchers find. They suggest the sensible approach is to strive for a minimum target of 30 percent now, rising to 90 percent by 2030. Remember, that's not meeting 30 percent of your energy demand with renewables—it's meeting 100 percent of the demand with renewables for 30 percent of the time.

Because the renewables will inevitably contribute at other times, this amounts to about 60 percent of energy demand, the researchers claim. However, they argue that that subsidies for renewable energy, nuclear power and fossil fuels, ignored in the study's cost calculations, provide a barrier to the market finding the least costly technology mix.

It's worth remembering that the findings apply to a very specific case: the PJM Interconnection. How transferable and how scalable—down as well as up—the lessons are is open to discussion. And the research does weigh projected technology costs against current fossil fuel costs, so we are firmly inside the realm of the hypothetical. However, the researchers argue that by using energy surpluses to offset gas for heating rather than selling it to other markets, they are actually under-valuing it. It's also worth noting than one author declared an interest in a solar education startup, another in an grid-integrated vehicle startup.

Ultimately, the researchers are effectively proposing a brand new paradigm for energy provision. Today, fossil fuels are consumed at a rate conversant with hourly demand. More recent emerging wisdom, tied in with the "smarting" of the grid, holds that for renewable energy to be viable, non-essential loads must be shed (i.e. turned off) at times of peak demand. So, having provided enough renewable energy to meet minimum demand, additional needs are met with fossil fuels, while non-essential demands are delayed or denied. A modern washing machine might delay its spin cycle, a warehouse might turn off its AC for a while (and perhaps get energy discounts for doing so). But this approach is flatly dismissed in this research.

"If we applied the findings of this article, in the future we would build variable generation, designing for enough capacity to make electric load for the worst hours, and as a side effect we will have enough extra electricity to meet thermal loads," the study concludes.

I'm told the way (at least the British) system works is sources are switched in or out of the grid based on demand, unit price and grid-transit losses at any given time and the storage capacity is essentially nill to a first approximation.

This leads to the madly inefficient situation where renewable (particularly wind) which were expensive to build but are producing energy for very low per-unit costs are often cut out of the system and the energy they could (or even are) producing is wasted while hydrocarbons are burned. The reason for this is because their owners are trying to recoup the large capital investment in the unit price they offer the grid making it higher at certain times than hydrocarbons.

Free markets are all very well, but the situation where you switch off a wind farm that is already built and producing energy with little cash or carbon overheads in favour of hydrocarbons is utterly daft. There must be sensible ways of addressing this. Maybe externalities pricing on the hydrocarbons might do it, or an obligation to use renewable at times when they could displace hydrocarbons, or simply smarter pricing systems that allow the renewable units to be priced competitively when they would otherwise be wasted but maintain the higher pricing at other times to cover upfront costs.

But this is all moot if renewables can't compete with fossil fuels. The key to finding out whether they can is the researcher's estimate that the total cost today of providing 1kWh of electricity via the PJM Interconnection is 17¢. The researchers used 2008 costs to calculate what it would take to supply all power from renewables for 30 percent of the day. By the researcher's calculations, the cost is already cheaper than the figure, coming in at 10 ¢/kWh.

...if your infrastructure is already built and land owned. How are start-up costs integrated in this model?

Did I miss the part where they say how the energy would be stored? I've seen a few articles on that over the years at ars but only the experimental stage. It sounds like they're proposing either storing as hydrogen* (which would require a whole bunch of new plants) or in electric car batteries in people's houses (but what would that do to the lifespan of said batteries, and how do we retrieve it when the cars are all driving to work.)

Decent study, but would require a whole lot of infrastructure changes.

But this is all moot if renewables can't compete with fossil fuels. The key to finding out whether they can is the researcher's estimate that the total cost today of providing 1kWh of electricity via the PJM Interconnection is 17¢. The researchers used 2008 costs to calculate what it would take to supply all power from renewables for 30 percent of the day. By the researcher's calculations, the cost is already cheaper than the figure, coming in at 10 ¢/kWh.

...if your infrastructure is already built and land owned. How are start-up costs integrated in this model?

The study authors note that the start-up costs are accounted for in their figures.

Depending on how well this is proofed, this could do a ton for U.S. energy self-sufficiency and, as a plus, provide a model for developing nations to produce their own lower carbon-footprint self-sufficient systems, although for most of them it will require some cooperation due to geographic restrictions.

Eventually Solar will be cheap but it just doesn't work where it is cloudy all the time.

Wind probably never will get much better, it just a bird killing novelty that makes lots of noise and takes up lots of space.

Bio fuels? Nope burning food for fuel is just dumb and starves the third world.

You've just refuted the researchers' argument against that claim with the same claim:

"You've probably heard the argument: wind and solar power are well and good, but what about when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine? But it's always windy and sunny somewhere. Given a sufficient distribution of energy resources and a large enough network of electrically conducting tubes, plus a bit of storage, these problems can be overcome—technologically, at least."

Eventually Solar will be cheap but it just doesn't work where it is cloudy all the time.

Wind probably never will get much better, it just a bird killing novelty that makes lots of noise and takes up lots of space.

Bio fuels? Nope burning food for fuel is just dumb and starves the third world.

The study purposefully excludes hydroelectric generation, which is one resource the British Isles potentially have more of than nearly every other country. But this assumes that Great Britain wouldn't include itself in an EU-wide electric grid, which seems rather silly when you consider the potential cost benefit over the longterm. Particularly as EU countries best suited for power production are also amongst the least wealthy and economically healthy. This could be a way for the EU to kill two birds with one stone, really.

These radical increases in peak load requirements of 180 and 200+% do not account for actual grid advancements and long distance low resitance infrastructure on an expanded load balance scale. On our current grid topology where one power drawing area can only reliably and efficintly pull power from a fw hundred miles away tops, grid balancing for localized lod changes is difficult if we're to stay on renewable-only power. However, the study done for the east coast (which in general applies elsewhere) has show that with superconducting lines (already in use, they're not vaporware, and they are affodable), a single 700 mile stretch covers enough variable weather pattern that it can produce a steady load to less than 5% variance 24x7x365, the larger the grid size, the more diverse land it covers, the lower the variance. If such a grid was extended inland, and a similar west coast grid, a gulf grid, and a north central, were all tied togehter, power could be shifted from one generation area to another over more than 1K miles with very little energy overhead lost, without resorting to energy storage AT ALL. Such large grids also reduce localized short-term energy peaks like dinnertime or primetime use peaks by stretching across time zones.

The issue is not the type of energy made, the issue is transmission. Superconducting lines are actually easy to deploy in the ocean, but require being buried in earth on land in populated areas (running on the surface through areas existing high-power lines exist is acceptable). It's more invasive than large overhead towers, but the transmission losses erased alone cover the cost of these syetms quickly. We can build the grid now even while we're still using fossil power, and slowly add in wind in the most profuitable places first, and more over time. The original plan I read was for the east and west coasts by 2030, and most of the nation by 2040, putting us on about 50-60% wind power by then, without any requirements for power storage.

Did I miss the part where they say how the energy would be stored? I've seen a few articles on that over the years at ars but only the experimental stage. It sounds like they're proposing either storing as hydrogen* (which would require a whole bunch of new plants) or in electric car batteries in people's houses (but what would that do to the lifespan of said batteries, and how do we retrieve it when the cars are all driving to work.)

Decent study, but would require a whole lot of infrastructure changes.

There's an inefficient brute power way of storing energy where you use the excess to pump water into tanks / raised supplies, and then when you need power you let it flow out through a turbine. It has massive inefficiencies, but the marginal cost for such energy is zero.

Would be cool to have an easy way to create something like Buthanol from surplus energy. Then scrap all the annoying electric cars and go back to the much cooler combustion engines.

But essentially the above is the reason I am not toooo worried about Global warming. Sometime in the next decade we will find a way to cost-effectively create energy from renewable sources. And from that point on everything will happen really really fast. We just should make sure not to build too many high-upfront cost things like coal power plants. Much better to use all the new shale gas to add gas plants. The sunk cost is far lower and they can be switched on and off at will to smooth out any fall in renewable power.

(Go Shale Go :-) )

I really am looking forward to a future after that when we have even cheaper, clean energy sources. Would be so awesome to be able to waste it. So many possibilities.

If you do not like winter, heat the city! 28 degrees Celsius in New York in the winter would be awesome. We could switch it off for christmas.

At the very least heat all the streets so we can scrap the stupid winter tires and shoveling and car eating salt.

With really cheap energy, flying would suddenly be so much cheaper and no need for energy saving velocities. How about a Mach4 jet. Weekend trips to Rio de Janeiro would be great.

The last decades physically not much did change. Yes our computers have totally transformed the way we work but physically? Not much has changed. Cars, Planes are basically the same. When we will have really cheap clean energy the whole world will suddenly change. It will be AWESOME.

I think the biggest problem with this entire issue is that they are still thinking in terms of "the grid". It's this centralized monolithic power generating system. When you do it that way, it's going to be highly inefficient. The proper solution is a de-centralized system where power is generated in the locality where it is used. Spread the system out to the areas the energy is intended to be used. Solar cells and wind power on every building. There's even technology on the way that can turn a window into a source of energy by applying a film to the glass that converts sunlight to energy. That would make those big glass office buildings in metro areas huge power generators.

The basic point is, that renewable energy will never work when used in a conventional centralized grid system. We have to think about de-centralized models that fit the needs of the local area instead of pumping out huge amounts of energy whether it gets used or not.

One big issue that is overlooked is how to transition from current fossil fuel use to the renewable energy. Let me explain what I mean:

Friend of mine works for a larger coal-fired power plant (1.4GW of output). The company that owns this plant has also put in a fairly large wind farm for renewable energy. One windy days, the coal plant does not need to work as hard because of the wind farm. This is great - renewable energy is offsetting coal emissions. One big problem -> long term contract with coal supplier. Coal will show up at a set rate (something like 25 trains per week) regardless of how fast the coal plant burns it. So if there is too much wind, excess coal builds up at the plant until they have to burn it inefficiently just to get rid of it (limited storage space for coal). Essentially the same amount of coal is being burned, so total emissions from the coal plant are the same, even with the renewable energy.

Eventually Solar will be cheap but it just doesn't work where it is cloudy all the time.

Wind probably never will get much better, it just a bird killing novelty that makes lots of noise and takes up lots of space.

Bio fuels? Nope burning food for fuel is just dumb and starves the third world.

Not sure I'm quite as pessimistic as you on Englands renewable prospects in the long term, however I would also want to replace the 'base load' currently primarily provided by coal with modern (NOT boiling water) nuclear plants.

Solar: Yes we have a lot of cloud cover, but if it gets cheap enough and is reasonably efficient in lower light conditions (there are technologies that look promising here) solar could still make a significant dent in daytime supply.

Wind: The birds, noise and space arguments have been largely over-hyped. There needs to be strict regulation for sure, but there are newer designs are incredibly quite. None of those factors is an issue offshore, but construction and maintenance costs are. Space on land isn't much of an issue in many locations. Many of the most suitable sites are used for either grain or sheep farming which can carry on with very little loss of land to the turbines. Bird and bat killing can be dramatically reduced by taking care when choosing sites and various modifications to the designs.

Biofuels: Whilst some primary biofuels do displace food production and other land uses or require extensive refining making them pretty unsuitable there are others which are based on use of wastes and byproducts. These could probably only make a very small contribution.

Then there's hydro & tide in narrow channels. - Can be surprisingly economical, but limited to relatively few locations.

I doubt renewables can be the whole story in the near future, but they could play a significant role.

Eventually Solar will be cheap but it just doesn't work where it is cloudy all the time.

Wind probably never will get much better, it just a bird killing novelty that makes lots of noise and takes up lots of space.

Bio fuels? Nope burning food for fuel is just dumb and starves the third world.

Actually, wind studies in the EU have shown significant advantage for wind, especially offshore, and they happen to have more wind already deployed and larger plans for more than just about anywhere on earth. As for the bird killings, a cell tower kills more birds anually by several fold than a wind turbine. 40-50m birds a year from communication towers, 70m a year from pesticides, 100m a year from windows, 130m a year from power lines, and all the wind farms total, about 25K... Even if we had enough towers to produce 200% of our power need, we'd still kill fewer birds with wind towers than communication towers. and that was before we implemented numerous additional saftey technologies to keep birds away. Even at 25K a year bird deaths trending, more than 4700 a year are from a SINGLE farm, greatly skewing the results, that is 20+ years old, and used a design no longer used which actually attracted birds, and which happens to be on a very specific migratory bird route. Fields using new towers, even along other migration routes, have less than 10% of the kill rates.

You're right about solar, its unviable on the large scale except in some select areas to offset daytime cooling costs withouty massive and unprofitable investment in storage well beyond what the wind indfustry has for even worst case scenarios, and even at its best costs more than wind.

Biofuels are also mostly farce. Though a good way to dispose of certain wastes, and something we SHOULD have as part of an overall plan, they are not a mass-source for fuel. However, other manufactured fuels, like those using RFTS technolgoy to reprocess collected carbon waste and CO2 from coal plants is 100% viable, affodable, nd a proven technology. instead of pumping sequestered CO2 into the ground, we could pump it into catalyst chambers and make fuel for about $4 a gallon (at the pump, not cost). A side effect of that process is we turn unpottable water into pure drinking water, and we also get to sell off waste O2 as a medical product. It's also chemically pure (no sulfur no heavy metals) reducing vehicle emissions, and runs in all current cars (the belnd includes petrols, diesels, greases, jetfuels, etc, just like oil refining, but without the chemical hazards pulled out of the earth we then have to deal with).

How is electrical heating less efficient than "gas" heating (by "gas" I assume you mean natural gas)?

A direct electrical heating element typically uses 100% of the power (not counting circulating fans, which would consume the same power whether the heater is electric or gas), whereas a natural gas heater typically vents some portion of the combustion out of the building, making it some percentage less than 100% efficient.

Of course, this is at the application of the energy to heat the building. The source of the energy has an impact on the efficiency - i.e., whether the source is hydro, generator powered by fossil fuels, coal power plants, solar or wind, will determine the total efficiency (hydro maybe being the most efficient?), but a blanket statement that gas is more efficient than electricity doesn't seem to be supported.

The real country to watch is Germany. They are pushing hardest with Solar/Wind energy.

While they are having some growing pains, they are pushing the transition now, when fossil fuels are still relatively available and inexpensive.

If you wait for the fossil energy crunch, then it gets more expensive and difficult to actually transition to an alternative structure.

When the rest of us hit the fossil crunch, and prices double (or worse), Germany will be buffered by their robust renewable infrastructure.

As far as storage, there are some interesting developments in grid level batteries.

Check out Ambri - Liquid metal batteries. This is a battery technology aimed directly at grid storage, developed to be inexpensive and robust, manufactured with common elements. Watch the TED talk at the link.

Bio fuels? Nope burning food for fuel is just dumb and starves the third world.

I'm heating my house primarily with wood pellets. They are mostly made from wood processing waste (sawdust). All carbon release is balanced by carbon taken in by trees, so it's not a net producer of carbon (except for transport). No food is consumed or cropland used. And it's produced in this country (or Canada) rather than imported from overseas. And, finally, much cheaper than oil.

There is a limit on how much of your fuel supply can come from this source, but certainly a valid component of a system that balances many sources.

Least not forgot the required acreage for the solar cells and wind turbines. Out in sunny California they would need to cover the desert floor with panels....

Solar is only really viable in desert areas anyway, used to offset daytime AC usage, but little else, and land is a non-issue in high-sun areas where solar is even remotely viable.

Most wind farms co-exist with actual farms perfectly well, using less than 5% of existing farm space. We have something on the order of 4,000 percent more viable turbine land than would be needed to provide the entire northern hemesphere's power by wind only. The core issue with wind is the distance of these lands from where the power is used. That's not a technically unsolvable problem, its just one that can;t be fixed overnight, our grid is very old and underserviced, and requires about 25 years of effort to expand and cross-connect for load balancing, and the deployment of newer high efficincy of superconducting poewr lines that can send power 500-1000 miles with the same tramsission losses we currently get from copper in less than 150. These lines may be expensive, but over 50 year operation lifecycles that actually cost less than high-voltage lines do.

The study purposefully excludes hydroelectric generation, which is one resource the British Isles potentially have more of than nearly every other country. But this assumes that Great Britain wouldn't include itself in an EU-wide electric grid, which seems rather silly when you consider the potential cost benefit over the longterm. Particularly as EU countries best suited for power production are also amongst the least wealthy and economically healthy. This could be a way for the EU to kill two birds with one stone, really.

I would love to see an EU wide grid that brought solar electricity from southern Europe to the wealthier north. It could help to hold the union together economically whilst dramatically cutting carbon emissions. Since Germany had decided to dump nuclear completely (based mostly on irrational, but emotive arguments) energy demands have become that little bit more urgent.

As a side note, even if there were a real basis to German safety concerns over nuclear power they have not fixed the problem - they are replacing their own nuclear production with nuclear electric imported from just over the French border instead. Fallout doesn't respect national borders.

Nope. Like in Germany the US has mandatory use requirements for renewable energy put on the grid.

Instead we get inefficiencies from having to run, but not use, gas power equivalent to ~30% of the current renewable load to maintain stable voltages when wind/solar power ramps down faster than gas turbines can spin up.

We're also starting to get inefficiencies due to the limited amount of gas on the grid exceeding the mismatch between when wind is most efficient (at night) and when demand is highest (in the day) resulting in power operators having to ramp coal plants up/down. The problem there is that coal plants take an efficiency hit when ramping up and down. A study I read a year or two ago found that in some areas the increased coal being burned due to the efficiency losses was large enough that total coal user would be lower if the wind turbines were shut down and the coal plants ran at a higher but more stable level. Hopefully the boom in gas burning power plants triggered by the current shale gas glut (and the need to replace ancient coal plants that can't meet current emissions standards) will be able to mitigate this problem in the next few years.

Bio fuels? Nope burning food for fuel is just dumb and starves the third world.

I'm heating my house primarily with wood pellets. They are mostly made from wood processing waste (sawdust). All carbon release is balanced by carbon taken in by trees, so it's not a net producer of carbon (except for transport). No food is consumed or cropland used. And it's produced in this country (or Canada) rather than imported from overseas. And, finally, much cheaper than oil.

There is a limit on how much of your fuel supply can come from this source, but certainly a valid component of a system that balances many sources.

In terms of carbon output, yes, wood pellets are aresome. But, the reason there's limits on it's use is not just cost/supply, but in the various other pollutants it introduces. Proper filtration of those pollutants is not possible on a home scale, annd if even a fraction of us used that for heat, we'de be taliing massive increases in local pollution including numerous biolagical hazards, not just environmental.

In remote places like canada, or the mid west where the scale of deployment is easily handled by the environment, or in places where it is replacing other even more polluting home heating systems, sure, it;s a great thing, and I don;t seek to stop it, but it is not a viable system for someone to considder who today operates on LPG or locally egnerated electricity for power as putting wood pellets in, though it lowers cO2 output, it increased carbon (dust) output, sulfurs, heavy metals, Ozone, and numerous other environmental hazarsds.

Eventually Solar will be cheap but it just doesn't work where it is cloudy all the time.

Wind probably never will get much better, it just a bird killing novelty that makes lots of noise and takes up lots of space.

Bio fuels? Nope burning food for fuel is just dumb and starves the third world.

Actually, wind studies in the EU have shown significant advantage for wind, especially offshore, and they happen to have more wind already deployed and larger plans for more than just about anywhere on earth. As for the bird killings, a cell tower kills more birds anually by several fold than a wind turbine. 40-50m birds a year from communication towers, 70m a year from pesticides, 100m a year from windows, 130m a year from power lines, and all the wind farms total, about 25K... Even if we had enough towers to produce 200% of our power need, we'd still kill fewer birds with wind towers than communication towers. and that was before we implemented numerous additional saftey technologies to keep birds away. Even at 25K a year bird deaths trending, more than 4700 a year are from a SINGLE farm, greatly skewing the results, that is 20+ years old, and used a design no longer used which actually attracted birds, and which happens to be on a very specific migratory bird route. Fields using new towers, even along other migration routes, have less than 10% of the kill rates.

From what we know currently the danger wind farms pose to birds is no different than any other vertical structure. The more structures we build up in to the air the more fatalities that will be caused by birds striking them. There are a lot of studies on this that have been completed, and a lot more still being conducted. Bird populations face the biggest danger from wind farms when we build them in areas that are considered critical habitat areas, or critical movement areas.

The study purposefully excludes hydroelectric generation, which is one resource the British Isles potentially have more of than nearly every other country. But this assumes that Great Britain wouldn't include itself in an EU-wide electric grid, which seems rather silly when you consider the potential cost benefit over the longterm. Particularly as EU countries best suited for power production are also amongst the least wealthy and economically healthy. This could be a way for the EU to kill two birds with one stone, really.

I would love to see an EU wide grid that brought solar electricity from southern Europe to the wealthier north. It could help to hold the union together economically whilst dramatically cutting carbon emissions. Since Germany had decided to dump nuclear completely (based mostly on irrational, but emotive arguments) energy demands have become that little bit more urgent.

As a side note, even if there were a real basis to German safety concerns over nuclear power they have not fixed the problem - they are replacing their own nuclear production with nuclear electric imported from just over the French border instead. Fallout doesn't respect national borders.

Transmission losses limit long distance power distribution to a few hundred miles/km. Super conducting lines becoming cheaper might make doing so feasible in the future; but you'd have an enormous capital expenditure to expand the grid first.

One estimate I saw was that it would take a mile wide belt of new lines IIRC 52 total (17? (feet vs yards)) to carry enough wind power from Nebraska to Illinois to power the city of Chicago. For scale Nebraska is roughly the size of England; Iowa is about 2/3rds as wide. The cost for building the lines themselves was more than that of building the wind turbines (and that estimate ignored the cost of acquiring the land to build them on) or the size of the US bailout at the start of the recession. Powering an entire country instead of just one large city would cost tens of trillions or more.

Edit: It might still be cheaper than building out the equivalent solar capacity in the cloudy north; but it will be a staggeringly expensive long term project.

How is electrical heating less efficient than "gas" heating (by "gas" I assume you mean natural gas)?

A direct electrical heating element typically uses 100% of the power (not counting circulating fans, which would consume the same power whether the heater is electric or gas), whereas a natural gas heater typically vents some portion of the combustion out of the building, making it some percentage less than 100% efficient.

Of course, this is at the application of the energy to heat the building. The source of the energy has an impact on the efficiency - i.e., whether the source is hydro, generator powered by fossil fuels, coal power plants, solar or wind, will determine the total efficiency (hydro maybe being the most efficient?), but a blanket statement that gas is more efficient than electricity doesn't seem to be supported.

You're assuming heat-strip style electric heating, which is rarely used becuase it is difficult to retrofit into most homes (without using space heaters which are less efficinent), and it can be a major fire hazard. The vast majority of central electric heat is by heat pump, whichis FAR less efficint than gas heat in both CO2 and cost comparrisons, and which has limitations on deployment to climates where the outdoor temperature is rearely more than 40 degrees F below the target interior temp.

In my home, I have 3 floors, and 3 independetly operating units. The main floor uses gas heat circulated by an AC system blower. The second and third floor use heat pumps. in reality, the bulk of heat generation is downstairs, and the upper systems simply move that air around effectively throughout the house adding only some additional heat. The third floor actually is set at only 66 degrees (we rarely go up there unless we have company staying, since I no longer work from home daily), but in winter even on the coldest days, the ambient heat rising keeps it at about 72-74 without running the system at all. My 4700sqft are heated for less than $110 in gas a month in the coldest months, added to about another $90 in base power bill. In summer, I hit almost $300 a month. The exetrior differnce in windoer months averages 38 degrees. The exterior difference in summer months averages only 18. If I had to run on heat pumps without gas heat, I'de be using more than $450 a month in power in the winter based on BTU equivalence of what my gas system uses (and that's BTUs of heat, not BTUs used, which is higher because of the rougly 10-15% going up the chimney pipe). In this scenario, no, electric is not even close to as efficient.

I love advances in efficiency, and am glad there's research going into improving collection and storage in general. I just don't like wind turbines on a large scale, aside from killing migratory birds they are ugly and noisy.

The DoE predicts 20% of US energy from wind by 2030, this year it's a little under 4% I believe. I'm hoping advances in solar outpace wind turbine installation. I'd be happy with some quiet aesthetically pleasing turbines too.

Transmission losses limit long distance power distribution to a few hundred miles/km. Super conducting lines becoming cheaper might make doing so feasible in the future; but you'd have an enormous capital expenditure to expand the grid first.

One estimate I saw was that it would take a mile wide belt of new lines IIRC 52 total (17? (feet vs yards)) to carry enough wind power from Nebraska to Illinois to power the city of Chicago. For scale Nebraska is roughly the size of England; Iowa is about 2/3rds as wide. The cost for building the lines themselves was more than that of building the wind turbines (and that estimate ignored the cost of acquiring the land to build them on) or the size of the US bailout at the start of the recession. Powering an entire country instead of just one large city would cost tens of trillions or more.

Edit: It might still be cheaper than building out the equivalent solar capacity in the cloudy north; but it will be a staggeringly expensive long term project.

That's funny, because the researchers in this very article contradict you. Did you even read it?

There's an inefficient brute power way of storing energy where you use the excess to pump water into tanks / raised supplies, and then when you need power you let it flow out through a turbine. It has massive inefficiencies, but the marginal cost for such energy is zero.

You mean pumped storage. It is 70-80% efficient, so it is actually quite efficient. The problem is that you need favorable geography to build it.

The study purposefully excludes hydroelectric generation, which is one resource the British Isles potentially have more of than nearly every other country. But this assumes that Great Britain wouldn't include itself in an EU-wide electric grid, which seems rather silly when you consider the potential cost benefit over the longterm. Particularly as EU countries best suited for power production are also amongst the least wealthy and economically healthy. This could be a way for the EU to kill two birds with one stone, really.

I would love to see an EU wide grid that brought solar electricity from southern Europe to the wealthier north. It could help to hold the union together economically whilst dramatically cutting carbon emissions. Since Germany had decided to dump nuclear completely (based mostly on irrational, but emotive arguments) energy demands have become that little bit more urgent.

As a side note, even if there were a real basis to German safety concerns over nuclear power they have not fixed the problem - they are replacing their own nuclear production with nuclear electric imported from just over the French border instead. Fallout doesn't respect national borders.

Transmission losses limit long distance power distribution to a few hundred miles/km. Super conducting lines becoming cheaper might make doing so feasible in the future; but you'd have an enormous capital expenditure to expand the grid first.

One estimate I saw was that it would take a mile wide belt of new lines IIRC 52 total (17? (feet vs yards)) to carry enough wind power from Nebraska to Illinois to power the city of Chicago. For scale Nebraska is roughly the size of England; Iowa is about 2/3rds as wide. The cost for building the lines themselves was more than that of building the wind turbines (and that estimate ignored the cost of acquiring the land to build them on) or the size of the US bailout at the start of the recession. Powering an entire country instead of just one large city would cost tens of trillions or more.

Edit: It might still be cheaper than building out the equivalent solar capacity in the cloudy north; but it will be a staggeringly expensive long term project.

The up front expense of superconducting lines is large, but, over even as little as 30 years, and just a 200 mile run, the savings vs transmission losses compensate completely, and over 500+ miles runs, that can be as little as 10 years. Superconducting lines also require near zero maintenance, since they're contained inside several layers of insulation and a vacuum chamber for the liquid nitrogen barrier compared to overhead copper which has frewient costs not only in line breakage and tower maintenance, but also in pruning and land maintenance requirements. though you won;t see these for local grid power, likely not even just from power company to substations, you will find multiple power stations linked on a single line or loop, and offshore and farm interconnections are perfect for this kind of venture, and can actually LOWER the buildout cost of a wind farm be eliminating other expensive power balance offsetting equipment or local storage costs which are higher than these line costs.

Did I miss the part where they say how the energy would be stored? I've seen a few articles on that over the years at ars but only the experimental stage. It sounds like they're proposing either storing as hydrogen* (which would require a whole bunch of new plants) or in electric car batteries in people's houses (but what would that do to the lifespan of said batteries, and how do we retrieve it when the cars are all driving to work.)

Decent study, but would require a whole lot of infrastructure changes.

The use of electric cars as a battery don't require as many infrastructure changes as you'd think (aside from people actually using electric cars). Some more info here: http://www.udel.edu/V2G/index.html

I was involved in that project for a little while - the idea was that electric cars would participate in the distributed battery and be paid for their service. From the supply side, the grid of cars would participate in regional frequency regulation markets. That more or less is quick-response-time for responding to temporary fluctuations in the supply/demand of power. So there'd be actual cash offsetting any degradation of the lifetime of the battery.

Also, bidirectional power (like batteries) isn't the only thing that can stabilize things. If the grid can tell your fridge to run when there's excess supply, that helps too.

In the example of driving to work, residential demand for power has dropped during that time period, so it might not be so bad. On the other hand, I've heard that much of the demand is industrial. Either way, that might be one time period where reliance on fossil fuels is more important (or the few companies playing in the market with giant batteries might help).

But this is all moot if renewables can't compete with fossil fuels. The key to finding out whether they can is the researcher's estimate that the total cost today of providing 1kWh of electricity via the PJM Interconnection is 17¢. The researchers used 2008 costs to calculate what it would take to supply all power from renewables for 30 percent of the day. By the researcher's calculations, the cost is already cheaper than the figure, coming in at 10 ¢/kWh.

...if your infrastructure is already built and land owned. How are start-up costs integrated in this model?

The study authors note that the start-up costs are accounted for in their figures.

Depending on how well this is proofed, this could do a ton for U.S. energy self-sufficiency and, as a plus, provide a model for developing nations to produce their own lower carbon-footprint self-sufficient systems, although for most of them it will require some cooperation due to geographic restrictions.

What about a nation which is primarily rainforest? Do we advocate for Solar or Wind, even though that probably means cutting down more rainforest to place solar panels? We look at the US and we have options - deserts, already developed spaces (rooftops, sides of buildings, 'solar canopies' over parking lots, road surfaces [there's some startup investigating the possibility of solar roads; if they can make that work, we have probably millions of square miles of road surface which could potentially be used]), but maybe not so much in small developing nations with lots of rainforests or other fragile habitat?

How is electrical heating less efficient than "gas" heating (by "gas" I assume you mean natural gas)?

electrical heat has two main downfalls i can think of right off the top of my head: generation efficiency and transmission loss.

natural gas nas neither of those downfalls, and modern heaters have gotten efficiencies up into the 90% range. since there is no transmission loss with gas, and "generation" costs are nowhere near what electrical's are (gas treatment (to put in the mercaptan "smell") and storage/pumping facilities are not as complex as power generation stations. In fact, some of them are completely self-sufficient - they burn some of the gas to power the compressor engines, and generate enough power to run the plant itself. this is why natural gas is usually still functional after a natural disaster like an ice storm or hurricane.

the other big plus for gas heat is that the actual heat generation happens right where it's needed. in a gas-fired electrical plant, you use gas to boil water, which turns turbines, then pushes that power down the lines to the end user. there's no way that can possibly be as efficient as simply burning the gas right on site to achieve the same result (warm air), because there's more moving parts in between to reduce efficiency.

It seems they only fed weather data for one 4 year period. Statistical modelling should have warranted them to do at least 10,000 times of that so 10,000 4 year or 28 year data sets and figured the average/median of those results. We can't tell using one 1 set of data if that 4 year period was particularly good for electrical generation of particularly bad or the expected usual results.

But this is all moot if renewables can't compete with fossil fuels. The key to finding out whether they can is the researcher's estimate that the total cost today of providing 1kWh of electricity via the PJM Interconnection is 17¢. The researchers used 2008 costs to calculate what it would take to supply all power from renewables for 30 percent of the day. By the researcher's calculations, the cost is already cheaper than the figure, coming in at 10 ¢/kWh.

...if your infrastructure is already built and land owned. How are start-up costs integrated in this model?

The study authors note that the start-up costs are accounted for in their figures.

Depending on how well this is proofed, this could do a ton for U.S. energy self-sufficiency and, as a plus, provide a model for developing nations to produce their own lower carbon-footprint self-sufficient systems, although for most of them it will require some cooperation due to geographic restrictions.

What about a nation which is primarily rainforest? Do we advocate for Solar or Wind, even though that probably means cutting down more rainforest to place solar panels? We look at the US and we have options - deserts, already developed spaces (rooftops, sides of buildings, 'solar canopies' over parking lots, road surfaces [there's some startup investigating the possibility of solar roads; if they can make that work, we have probably millions of square miles of road surface which could potentially be used]), but maybe not so much in small developing nations with lots of rainforests or other fragile habitat?

I don't know. I'm sure someone who actually knows a lot more about power systems engineering has thought about and presented research on this subject, but I'm not familiar with it.